Kirshenbaum is the chair of the Writing Division at Columbia University and the author of two short story collections and six novels. Her latest, The Scenic Route, is at once a lovers’ travelogue of Europe, a family history, and an apology to the protagonist’s best friend. Here, she chats with Flavorpill about the new book, teaching, infidelity, and chick lit.

Flavorpill: The Scenic Route has a layered structure: the narrator Sylvia is telling stories to her lover Henry as they drive around Europe, while at the same time she imagines telling the story of the lover and the trip to her friend Ruby. Where did this structure come from? What was the germ of this idea?

Binnie Kirshenbaum: The germ of it all was the idea of storytelling and how we tell stories — how one story leads to another story leads to another. I was thinking about this idea that our lives are nothing but this series of stories that interconnect and overlap. Without stories, we actually don’t exist. It’s what our memories are, both our own and others’ memories of us after we’re dead. It’s all in story form. But they’re not neat in that way they might be in a story collection. When we’re talking, telling them, I realized we go back and fill in a piece here or we give some back story or we go off on tangents.

In The Catcher in the Rye, there’s the little moment when Holden is talking about somebody reading an essay in school and the teacher’s yelling, “Digression! Digression!” And I always thought, well, the digressions really are the interesting parts. The tangents that the stories take; the different routes of how we get from the beginning to the end. That was kind of the thing I was really getting at with this book. This examination of storytelling: why we tell them, how we tell them, and where stories go and what they add up to in the very end.

FP: Based on this and some of your other books, it seems like infidelity is a topic that interests you as a writer. Why?

BK: I’m not really sure. Certainly relationships and how people relate to each other interests me. Betrayal interests me a lot as an idea — that we try to be good people and we love people and yet we still somehow often betray them in different ways. I write about men and women a lot, and about that particular betrayal. In this case, it is Henry who is the adulterer. But with my other books, when women commit adultery, it’s treated in a different way by society. It’s condemned in a whole other way. I mean it’s condemned regardless, but it’s particularly harsh for women. I think about books like Madame Bovary or something, and they have to die because they have transgressed in this particular way. But the men don’t have to die when they do it [in fiction]. I suppose I’ve wanted to turn the tables on that in the past.

There’s also that whole other idea that’s always interested me, which is the concept of marriage as it was first conceived, as a business arrangement or a political arrangement, and not a love arrangement. The idea that people get married because they love each other is only 200 years old, and so love was always outside of marriage. That was an important idea; that you couldn’t be in love in a marriage. And I think that idea I always found very intriguing, because good marriages really are partnerships, whereas tempestuous love affairs do not survive marriage, and marriage couldn’t survive tempestuousness. So it’s like, to write about passion, it has to be outside of marriage.

FP: How do you feel about being a teaching writer? Can it be taught?

BK: There’s that little part in The Scenic Route where Sylvia talks about playing the piano and having no gift for it. When I was a child I tried five or six different instruments over the course of four or five years, and I had no feel for any of it. I could learn the notes and I could learn how to play a song, I just could never do it well. I think it’s similar with writing. We can get some one to get their hands around the basics of it, but we can’t teach somebody to be great. We can pull the talent out. We can push and prod and ask questions and show things. I think writing teachers do what great editors can do. They can take what’s there, and they can really make something happen with it. So I think in that way, it can be taught in the same way any other art can be taught.

I think the reason people used to say writing can’t be taught is that everyone comes to writing being literate. But they don’t come to other art forms knowing necessarily anything about them. So when you study music, and you sit down and you’ve never played the piano before and you’ve got a piano teacher, you realize you’re learning these basics and you can see that. When you come to writing, well, you know how to write. What you don’t know how to do necessarily is write a good story… With any art form, you can’t teach genius. I can teach some one to polish craft and to perfect it and to dig around and find what’s really there.

I think a lot of students come in and they want to do something that isn’t natural to them, or they want to write something that is in their hearts or in their minds. They’ve got a great story there and they haven’t figured out what it is yet or how to approach it. I think writing teachers can pull them out and make them better. Young writers always got together and read their work and discussed it and criticized it. The difference now is that instead of doing it in salons or bars, we do it in the classroom. That idea, the workshop idea, is as old as the hills. Now it’s more formal in the university setting. I don’t see how anybody can write without response along the way.

FP: Can you talk a little bit about “gendered” fiction, how people receive books by women differently than men?

BK: It drives me nuts. I think women writers have a much tougher time being taken seriously. It has to do with the market. Women read more; they buy more books. So it makes sense from a marketing standpoint that you want to pitch the women. However, in doing this, it’s my belief that the pitch is always to the lowest common denominator. The idea is to get the book out there to as many people as possible, as many women as possible. The bigger the group, the lower the bar.

The sort of generic, what-goes-around-the-book-club sort of reader, they are looking for a kind of book that is inspirational, where the characters are likable, where they can identify with the characters. “Oh, I really identified with this book. Aren’t I great? I’m so cute.” Which is where the world of chick lit comes from. There’s that tendency to grab onto any book by a woman and push it in that direction, even if it doesn’t belong there — that kind of feel-good literature, or chick lit literature where you read it and it’s a happy experience and there’s no examination of anything ugly about the human condition. Whereas with men there’s this whole different kind of audience… Men who read fiction are usually very serious, smart readers, and women who buy and read books by men are very serious, smart readers. And so they don’t make [books by] men go there.

His memoir, Impossible Man, is the hub around which his other books, and his status as a leading nontraditional scholar of Islam, all turn. The Impossible Man of the title is at once Knight himself, his mother performing the roles of both parents, and a comic character created by his paranoid schizophrenic father. He describes the slow series of revelations about that absent father that came throughout his childhood, and how these informed the search for identity and belonging we all undertake as adolescents.

This is the book’s strength — though most of us have never lived through the violent histrionics of an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic, at least three legal name changes, or converting from our parents’ religion to Islam before we had our driver’s license, we have all embarked on that search for self and felt the same yearning to influence the world around us. Knight’s straightforward tone, and his mother’s patient observations about his development, make his story entirely sympathetic.

The zeal with which he approaches his conversion is present also in his relationship to elements of pop culture that will be familiar to readers born in the late ’70s and early ’80s — WWF, Public Enemy, Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, and later, punk rock, of both the straight-edge and working class drunk varieties. Rather than dramatizing the uniqueness of his experiences, Knight makes them accessible to all of us. This is as much a memoir of a childhood that many of us share, beginning with Hulk Hogan and ending with a professor, at a loss for any other meaningful activity, continuing class as the Twin Towers fall, as it is a portrait of non-violent American Islam.

Opium Magazine‘s Literary Death Match seems like the perfect venue for the Impossible Man, who was kicked out of one college for instigating bloody backyard wrestling matches on campus; tonight at Pianos on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Michael Mohammad Knight faces off against Emmy Award-winning TV writer Alan Zweibel, and novelists Rivka Galchen and Josh Weil. They’ll be judged on high by Ben Greenberg of Grand Central Publishing, Chris March of Project Runway, and comedienne Chelsea Peretti.

Doors at 7 p.m., smackdown at 8 p.m.! Hollah @flavorpill if you’re there.

We’ve been meaning to tell you about Pasha Malla‘s story collection, The Withdrawal Method, for a while now.It’s good and weird and a little imperfect in that way that writers sometimes are before they hit it exactly right and publish something that blows your mind. Today’s Fiction Fix was the perfect opportunity, because Malla has a story in the latest issue of Tin House, which features the tantalizing theme “appetites.” Malla’s story describes the appetites of one small boy and his big sister’s friends, which run to peanut butter, Clue, pre-pubescent rape fantasies, and of course, New Kids on the Block.

“Ginny had once told Alex that Heather loved Jordan Knight so much that some nights she would just cry and cry and cry.”

Dude. Kids are creepy.

Everyone on the subway was reading something famous this week. Which would make sense if we’d never done this before, but usually the commuters of New York City display a wider variety of taste. Lots of folks are reading Elizabeth Edwards’ new memoir, Resilience. In these trying times we can probably all use some “reflections on the burdens and gifts of facing life’s adversities,” in spite of what HuffPo has to say. We also saw Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld — and here we must admit that we actually remember when she won a fiction contest in Seventeen magazine, because we were the kind of dorks who actually read the fiction in Seventeen. Which might be why Prep‘s creepily accurate portrayal of high school gave us such intense flashbacks. We spotted The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by the truly awesome Haruki Murakami as well as some non-fiction: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc‘s Random Family, and Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven.

Oh my god, you guys, it’s National Short Story Month! [crickets] Yeah, for some reason this month gets a bit less love than National Poetry Month. Fortunately, this tragically neglected medium has us to bring you fun and excitement in the form of short fiction each week. Today we point to Fogged Clarity, a nascent online-only mag that is updated once a month [full disclosure: the Clarity was kind enough to publish the work of one of your fine Flavorpill writers a few months back. But you know we wouldn't be pimping this story, written by a person we don't know, if we didn't love it.]

Read on after the jump.

So first of all, if your name is M. David Hornbuckle, or something else that sounds like you might be a fictional character, you’re pretty much required to be a writer. So good start, M. David! His piece in the May issue of Fogged Clarity is called The Boy Who Cried Wolves:

“The wolves were microscopic, dogpaddling in his superior and inferior canals and exiting through the lacrimal ducts like the ramp at the end of a waterslide. Those that survived being wiped from his reddening cheeks began to grow, forming tiny packs in the plush carpet. It was a difficult life for the wolves, but still many persevered. When they grew large enough to be visible to the human eye, they stayed hidden in the back of the pantry behind a long-forgotten box of falafel mix. They fed on a box of dried beef bouillon for protein.”

Now is the part when you click through and read the rest.

More of our favorite books popping up in public after the jump.The Virgin Suicides and The Year of Magical Thinking were welcome breaks from the sea of indistinguishable Ludlums and Pattersons and Baldaccis we see so often. Exit Ghost, eh, we’re not totally sold on Roth, but he beats the hell out of waiting for the new Dan Brown.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (and the straight-outta-grad-school conversation going on above it) reminded us of a party we went to once  — on the way out the door, a stranger spotted a copy of Has Modernism Failed? next to the pile of coats and, with much laughter, asked “Who’s reading THAT?” Um, our date.

Also seen: The Alchemist (is Coehlo really that good? Maybe we just don’t like fables); Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom; I, Mona Lisa with a Norwalk Library stamp, and Terry Goodkinds Stone of Tears, which until just now when we looked it up, we thought was State of Tears, and a historical novel about the displacement of Native Americans. Oops.

Endearing businessman Boris Timanovsky told a story about becoming his own pen pal, and perfect match(.com).

Writer/lawyer Petina Gappah described how her elementary school was a wee bit slow to catch up with Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.

The incomparable Bokara Legendre shared what she learned when she went to Nepal for a party and found inner peace. “The party is always there, and the peace is always there. It’s simply a matter of choice.”

Hungarian writer László Garaczi, via translator André Balog, told the audience about how two car crashes turned him from an atheist to an agnostic, and taught us not to buy cars that pigs will eat.

Salman Rushdie shared his strategy for beating writer’s block: visiting a revolution in progress. After he returned from Nicaragua in 1986, he thought, “Home — safe — nothing bad will ever happen again!” Then he sat down and wrote the final draft of The Satanic Verses. Cue raucous and knowing literary laughter.

The things they’d like to remain unchanged?

“My son’s appetite for life.”

“My mind — it changes all the time.”

“My wife.”

“One of my decisions, for at least a whole day.”

“My computer monitor.”

Post your guesses about which response goes with which speaker in the comments!

This has been interesting for two reasons: one, if you’ve never heard of the Kindle, you must not spend large portions of your days online reading publishing-oriented websites, and for that, we salute you. Two, people who have never heard of Kindle think it’s cool when they see ours and we explain it. No one on the subway or the Bolt Bus has expressed the suspicion and vitriol towards the device that has cropped up on the Internet since it’s introduction. So Amazon? How’s about you start shelling out for our monthly Metrocard, in exchange for the valuable viral marketing service we’re providing? Finally, just last night, we saw another Kindle on the F train. It was all we could do to keep from accosting this fellow and claiming kinship. Despite what we’ve said before, and what Joanne Kaufman said in last Sunday’s Times, we could actually see what he was reading: The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Not our favorite, we confess, but still: rock on, brother!

But back to books in print. Riding the rails this week, we spotted Always Looking Up, by everyone’s favorite stem-cell research advocate and time traveler Michael J. Fox, and Per Petterson’s widely praised Out Stealing Horses, which is most definitely on our summer reading list. We saw She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb and wonder if we were the only ones who hated that book and if something might be horribly wrong with us because of it. We did like “Come Undone” by Duran Duran in middle school. Does that count?

Perhaps in honor of the PEN World Voices festival, there were a few internationally-themed books in the subways: Havana by Stephen Hunter, London Fields by Martin Amis, and I’m A Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away by Bill Bryson.

Last but far from least, we keep bumping into Todd Zuniga, founder of the Opium endeavors: Magazine, Live interview series, and the Literary Death Match. Are we being stalked? If so, at least he’s got good taste: we found him on a train to the Lower East Side clutching Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower.

NOON is a literary annual edited by Diane Williams, and the latest issue is the 10th. The magazine has been widely and highly praised for qualities that aren’t surprising to readers familiar with Williams’ work: the fiction is often brief, and its remarkable qualities are to be found on the sentence level rather than in the scope of the plot. Gary Lutz is no exception. Read more about the latest from NOON and Lutz after the jump. This issue of NOON features many writers who have contributed regularly to the magazine over the years – Lutz has appeared in 8 of the 10 editions. “I Have to Feel Halved” is a series of memories and observations a lonely older man is making about his much younger lover and their doomed affair, but it is also a series of Lutz’s sentences, each a poem unto itself:

“The way his name broke itself out of the alphabet and could barely be held to its spelling: it queered the mouth that pronounced it.”

“He had had a chandeliered childhood, I have made delay to mention, and grown up trading spectral affections with grandaunts, letting great-uncles pant and prevail.”

If these sentences don’t make you want to run out and buy NOON, and Gary Lutz’s collections, we don’t know what will.

We also saw Dead Aim by Thomas Perry, which has an appealingly Chandleresque premise, but does not sound quite like our sort of thing. We spotted another mystery novel, this old copy of The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie, and Herman Wouk’s World War II epic The Winds of War.

A few more timely non-fiction books rounded out our subway spying: The Audacity of Hope — perhaps you’ve heard of the author, Barack Obama — and Thomas J. Craughwell’s Stealing Lincoln’s Body. The ill-fated plot to steal the presidential remains is considered a “footnote” in our country’s history, but we think it deserves more attention — it’s a lot more interesting to teenagers than memorizing the Gettysburg Address.

We ended this round of book watching by almost knocking a copy of Leonard Michaels’ Collected Stories out an open window at an impromptu mid-week party, sparking a discussion of intense Michaels appreciation. Our favorite story in the book is “Murderers.”